Re: Portability/Compatability between GNUstep <---> Cocoa...

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 12 Jan 2004, at 08:08, thisguyisi wrote:
> The mission statement of GNUstep.org indicates things that are sane 
> Cocoa additions to the OpenStep spec will be included in GNUstep (the 
> API).
>
> Perhaps GNUstep should be structured in 3 distinct chunks. Internally 
> @ the core the OpenStep compliant code, aka "OpenStep canon." A second 
> chunk of code would be the GNUstep-extensions layer (GNUstep's 
> extensions to the OpenStep spec). Thirdly a Cocoa computability layer 
> (e.g. Portability Kit) where all of Cocoa's extensions to the OpenStep 
> spec could "live".
>
> Maybe this is how it is set-up/designed already, or perhaps the 
> extensions that have been deemed "good" are interspersed/intermingled 
> with GNUstep's OpenStep compatible code.
>
> I know there are flags to enable/disable various levels of 
> compatibility between strict OpenStep-compatible code, and 
> Cocoa-compatible code.
>
> How exactly is GNUstep designed at the moment?

For the base library, the GNUstep specific extensions are in a separate 
subdirectory and can be built standalone for use without base.
For both base and gui, MacOS-X extensions are intermingled with the 
rest of the code, and there are compiler preprocesssor  values
used to control #ifdef  statements in the headers so that application 
programmers can decide whether their software builds with
MacOS-X and GNUstep extensions available or not (the default is for all 
extensions to be available to the application code).

I'd like to put "bad" MacOS-X extensions in another subdirectory and 
mark their use as not being recommended for style/simplicity
reasons.  However, nobody has contributed any code in this category yet.